Perhaps Ms. Uruchima and her son could bicycle to PS/IS 49 in Middle Village from her Corona home. It’s about 20 minutes according to Ride the City from Corona Plaza. If she left at 7 am, she could get to school by 7:30 and then head to downtown Brooklyn to her day job at 8:30.

The real crunch, of course, is in the afternoon. Thank heavens the school has gotten her son into an afterschool program.

HamTech87

RE: LIRR, Barclay’s Center, and the “Cross-Borough Scoot.” It is great that the LIRR is adding more trains to Brooklyn. But I’d love to hear from other Streetsblog readers what they think of the future configuration of LIRR to the Brooklyn — the “Cross-Borough Scoot”. It seems like a negative because it requires a transfer (although I don’t know how long the transfer walk in Jamaica station will be). But it does seem to provide more frequent service between downtown Brooklyn and Jamaica, which should make both these transit-oriented places even more desirable to live and work in.

Can we get a future Streetsblog story on this? Not a lot on the web about it, but I did find some details here on pages 18-19: http://www.nysenate.gov/files/pdfs/2010-14questions_and_answers_v2.pdf

Daphna

The Gothamist article about Carly Triche is good. The quotes in the article from Ms. Triche herself are very good.

She came to a full stop at 1st Avenue and East 7th Street at a red light. She looked around. There were no pedestrians and no drivers at the intersection. She then made a left turn and was pulled over half a block later and given a ticket.

The police ignore plenty of laws that they do not want to enforce. As an example, all “Don’t Honk: $350 fine” signs are going to be removed because the NYPD would not ticket for that offense. There are numerous traffic violations that the NYPD ignore; that can not claim that ticketing cyclists for going through red lights has to be done because it is the law. They ignore the law for plenty of infractions. The NYPD need to start ticketing for offenses that are endangering the public.

Miles Bader

The NYPD’s issues with cycling seem to be cultural—the NYPD is blue collar, conservative, kinda “old”… bicycling is, well, not most of those things.

Of course the fact that NYPD lets its personal predilections take precedence over enforcing the law and protecting the public is absolutely inexcusable, and needs to be changed (e.g., by getting rid of Ray Kelly who seems almost proud of this behavior, preferably “with prejudice”).

Joe R.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again-if you pass red lights on a bicycle check and double check for police cars (police on foot don’t matter-you can easily outrun them on a bike). If you happen to see a police car, just wait out the light. Not worth a costly ticket to save a few seconds. It’s cost me maybe 15 minutes tops over the last year waiting out lights when police are around. Better than wasting all day in court for a ticket.

Ray Kelly seriously needs to go. His selective enforcement would never hold up in a court of law. How many red light tickets have been given to cyclists relative to the percentage of cyclists on the road? My wild guess is the number is disproportionately higher than the number of red light tickets given to motorists. And how many tickets for pedestrians crossing against the light? That one’s easy-zero because that law hasn’t been enforced at all since the Guiliani administration when there was a very brief crackdown on jaywalkers (which quickly ended under public pressure). I’m not suggesting that we should start giving pedestrians tickets. In fact, the idea is offensive to me. Rather, I think the NYPD should be held accountable for their disproportionate enforcement against a mode which by and large doesn’t kill or injure people. On that basis, I’ll bet nearly every red light ticket issued to cyclists would be thrown out.

And finally, change the law already to allow cyclists to treat reds as yields to stop this nonsense once and for all. The red lights wouldn’t even be there if not for all the cars. They really serve no valid safety function for either cyclists or pedestrians. Both can easily determine if the way is clear without the need for traffic signals.